The US Fish and Wildlife service, another agency that seems ripe for pruning, has decided that it’s okay for greenies to kill rare Condors.

Rare meaning 226 left in the wild, many the product of an expensive government program to prevent extinction.

Federal wildlife officials took the unprecedented step Friday of telling private companies that they will not be prosecuted for inadvertently harassing or even killing endangered California condors.

In a decision swiftly condemned by conservationists and wildlife advocates, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said operators of Terra-Gen Power’s wind farm in the Tehachapi Mountains will not be prosecuted if their turbines accidentally kill a condor during the expected 30-year life span of the project.

So windmills have a license to kill. Contrast that to US Fish and Wildlife’s decision regarding hunting not-so-endangered species in Texas.

Daily Caller

A court case filed by one animal rights group may cause three endangered species to become extinct.

The three species of African antelope — the scimitar-horned oryx, the addax and the dama gazelle — are already nearly extinct in their native Africa. But they are thriving on the plains of Texas, mostly on ranches where hunters pay thousands of dollars for the privilege of hunting them.

For decades this practice has meant roughly 10 percent of the herd on any given ranch is culled annually, with the proceeds allowing the ranchers to continue to feed and breed these animals.

But animal rights activists generally oppose all hunting, including hunts on exotic game ranches. They have successfully sued to have it stopped, and now the ranchers are faced with a dilemma: How do they continue to support animals which they have no economic reason to keep, but are prohibited from killing?

Since 2005 an exemption to the Endangered Species Act has allowed ranchers to raise the three species, and hunters to stalk them, without a special permit. In all, Texas ranchers had about 1,800 of the animals in 2004. With the exemption in place, those numbers swelled to more than 17,000 by 2011.

CBS News aired a “60 Minutes” feature story about the controversy on Jan. 29. Priscilla Feral, president of the animal rights group Friends of Animals, told correspondent Lara Logan that she has waged a seven-year legal battle to get the exemption overturned.

Feral won. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a new regulation, scheduled to go into effect on April 4.

On that date, the agency says, “the three antelope species will be treated the same as all other captive-bred endangered species in the United States.

Got that? The hunting ranches kept rare species alive without federal grants or intervention. Now a busybody uses the federal government to end hunting because it offends her sensibilities.

Hear this, Obama: “…voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems…”

Yes, we’re talking about you and yours.

Conservatives have argued forever that free market capitalism is the greatest anti-poverty program.

It’s refreshing to hear Bono express this idea.

Of course, because human being are not equally talented or ambitious, the engine of capitalism creates wealth gaps, something progressives abhor. Obama tops that list.

I wish that Mitt Romney could have been a better explainer. Just one teachable moment like this below could have done wonders.

IBD

A mission was attacked after warnings, Americans were killed after security requests were denied, and a diplomat went on TV to explain it all — our current U.N. ambassador, after embassy bombings in 1998.’What troubles me so much is the Benghazi attack in many ways echoes the attacks on both embassies in 1998, when Susan Rice was head of the African region for our State Department,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Wednesday after two hours with our U.N. ambassador. “In both cases, the ambassador begged for additional security.”

In both cases, Susan Rice was involved more than she would like to admit.

In the spring of 1998, Prudence Bushnell, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, sent an emotional letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright begging for a more secure embassy in the face of mounting terrorist threats and a warning that she was the target of an assassination plot.

The State Department had repeatedly denied her request, citing a lack of money. But that kind of response, she wrote Albright, was “endangering the lives of embassy personnel.”

A matter of months later, on Aug. 7, 1998, the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were simultaneously attacked with car bombs. In Kenya, 12 American diplomats and more than 200 Africans were killed.

As in Benghazi, requests for more security were denied, warnings were issued, prior incidents were ignored and Susan Rice went on TV to explain it all.

Within 24 hours, Rice, then assistant secretary of state for African affairs, went on PBS as spokesperson for the administration — just as she was regarding Benghazi when she parroted the administration’s false narrative on five Sunday talk shows on Sept. 16, 2012, that Benghazi was caused by a flash mob enraged by an Internet video. Then, as now, she worked for a Clinton.

Also then, as now, she went on TV to claim, falsely, that we “maintain a high degree of security at all of our embassies at all times” and that we “had no telephone warning or call of any sort like that, that might have alerted either embassy just prior to the blast.” There were plenty of warnings and our East African diplomats were begging for help as Ambassador Chris Stevens was in Benghazi.

Eerie similarities between Benghazi and Nairobi are many…

Why was the Benghazi consulate left unprotected?

French citizens do not have the right to free speech (Dear Obama, this makes us exceptional in ways no other nation is.)

So the French want to criminalize denial of the Turkish genocide.

The latest dispute with France began late last year when a deputy in Sarkozy’s ruling Union for a Popular Movement party introduced legislation calling for a one-year prison sentence and a $59,000 fine for anyone who espoused a belief that there was no genocide of Armenians under Ottoman rule during and immediately after World War I.

The number of dead is still in dispute, ranging from 300,000 to 1.5 million. Turkey acknowledges that atrocities were committed, but denies that there was a systematic attempt to destroy the Armenian people.

After the bill was passed by the lower house of the French Parliament in December, Erdogan recalled Turkey’s ambassador from Paris, banned the landing and docking of French military aircraft and warships in Turkey and suspended political and economic talks.

They should pass a companion bill criminalizing French involvement in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Rwanda has accused France of playing an active role in the genocide of 1994, in which about 800,000 people were killed.

An independent Rwandan commission said France was aware of preparations for the genocide and helped train the ethnic Hutu militia perpetrators.

The report also accused French troops of direct involvement in the killings.

It named 33 senior French military and political figures that it said should be prosecuted. France has previously denied any such responsibility.

Among those named in the report were the late former President, Francois Mitterrand, and the then Prime Minister Edouard Balladur.

Two men who went on to become prime minister were also named – Alain Juppe, the foreign minister at the time, and his then chief aide, Dominique de Villepin.

The French foreign ministry told the BBC it would only respond to the fresh allegations after reading the report, which was released on Tuesday afternoon.

Checkpoints

Earlier this year France’s Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner denied French responsibility in connection with the genocide, but said political errors had been made…

The fun starts at about one minute.

LA Times:

…”One of the things growing up, I caught malaria at least twice a year. I lost cousins, around five of them. And if you speak to any African boy who is 29 years old and grew up in an African village, he would either have a similar situation, or worse,” he said in a phone interview from Tanzania, where he works as an entomologist for the Ifakara Health Institute, a medical and public health research institute.

Mosquitoes responsible for spreading malaria, such as the female Anopheles varieties, are particularly attracted to feet.

In a splendid example of African inventiveness, Okumu is developing a toxic mosquito trap for African villages that attracts the insects using a human scent that mosquitoes apparently cannot resist: smelly socks.

After his mentor, a Dutch medical entomologist, discovered the insects’ strange affinity to foot odor by standing naked in a room full of mosquitoes to see where they bit him, Okumu was driven to find a cheap, practical way to use the knowledge. His plan would enlist the services of villagers who would wear cotton pads in their socks, to be used as bait in mosquito traps, a cheaper option for villages than using chemically synthesized foot odor.

The project, which has received $775,000 in funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Grand Challenges Canada, is designed to eradicate mosquitoes outdoors, to complement the big strides made in cutting malaria deaths using treated bed nets, malarial drugs and spraying.

“We believe African innovators are best placed to solve African problems,” said Peter Singer of Grand Challenges Canada, which seeks out African inventors with out-of-the box ideas. “I think there’s a lot of value at the table in terms of tapping bright young African innovators who have great ideas and who could be more fully enabled to tackle their own challenges.”

Phillip Gourevitch has a great article in the current New Yorker about the formation of Rwanda’s national cycling team.

This one is worth printing out and reading in full.

…Gasore isn’t sure exactly when he was born, so he doesn’t know if he was nine or ten in 1997, when his father died. His mother had died when he was an infant, and his father had remarried and had more children. Sometimes his father came home, and sometimes he brought food, but not most of the time. He was a hard drinker, who got so far gone that he couldn’t afford the next drink—and Gasore said that the thirst, plus tuberculosis, did him in. But Gasore didn’t sound sure about that, either. He kept qualifying his account of his father’s death with the words “I think.” The way he told his story, there was only one thing certain about his childhood. “I had to fend for myself, or else die,” he said.

In northwest Rwanda, in the wet, chilly foothills of the Virunga volcanoes, the soil is black from lava, and ideal for growing potatoes. As a small child, armed with a sack, Gasore began making the rounds of village trading centers to scavenge fallen bits of potato. On good days, he might find a banana or an onion, too. When he was orphaned, he became a maibobo, a street kid—one of hundreds of thousands of children in Rwanda without adults to shelter them. Amid the country’s general poverty and hardship, theirs was a particularly mean existence, but for Gasore it was not such a big change. As he grew, the potato dealers put him to work, filling the hundred-kilo sacks that they trucked out to the rest of Rwanda. He was paid a coin here, a coin there, and, because he knew how to live without money, whenever he saved five hundred francs (nearly a dollar) he hid it away. (more…)

Five bucks.

That’s the going rate for Zimbabwe’s highest denomination note, the biggest ever produced for legal tender—and a national symbol of monetary policy run amok. At one point in 2009, a hundred-trillion-dollar bill couldn’t buy a bus ticket in the capital of Harare.

But since then the value of the Zimbabwe dollar has soared. Not in Zimbabwe, where the currency has been abandoned, but on eBay.

The notes are a hot commodity among currency collectors and novelty buyers, fetching 15 times what they were officially worth in circulation. In the past decade, President Robert Mugabe and his allies attempted to prop up the economy—and their government—by printing money. Instead, the country’s central bankers sparked hyperinflation by issuing bills with more zeros.

The 100-trillion-dollar note, circulated for just a few months before the Zimbabwe dollar was officially abandoned as the country’s legal currency in 2009, marked the daily limit people were allowed to withdraw from their bank accounts. Prices rose, wreaking havoc.

The runaway inflation forced Zimbabweans to wait in line to buy bread, toothpaste and other essentials. They often carried bigger bags for their money than the few items they could afford with a devalued currency…

It’s a tragic story, a once thriving nation put to ruin by an idiot despot.

I’ve been going through my stack of unread New Yorkers. I found this Oct 11 article about how global humanitarian efforts can exacerbate humanitarian crises.

Those us old enough remember the Biafran babies, their stomachs swollen from gas as they starved to death in 1968.The images were heartbreaking.

So much so that It got to where President Lyndon Johnson told his Undersecretary of State, “Just get those nigger babies off my TV set.” (It’s one of the ironies of our time that a man capable of saying that was more responsible for the black  civil rights gains  than anyone.)

Then there were the recent horrors of children having their hands chopped off in Sierra Leone.

This was what [Dutch journalist] Linda Polman had come to Makeni to hear. The conventional wisdom was that Sierra Leone’s civil war had been pure insanity: tens of thousands dead, many more maimed or wounded, and half the population displaced—all for nothing. But Polman had heard it suggested that the R.U.F.’s rampages had followed from “a rational, calculated strategy.” The idea was that the extreme violence had been “a deliberate attempt to drive up the price of peace.” Sure enough, Polman met a rebel leader in Makeni, who told her, “We’d worked harder than anyone for peace, but we got almost nothing in return.” Addressing Polman as a stand-in for the international community, he elaborated, “You people looked the other way all those years. . . . There was nothing to stop for. Everything was broken, and you people weren’t here to fix it.”

In the end, he claimed, the R.U.F. had escalated the horror of the war (and provoked the government, too, to escalate it) by deploying special “cut-hands gangs” to lop off civilian limbs. “It was only when you saw ever more amputees that you started paying attention to our fate,” he said. “Without the amputee factor, you people wouldn’t have come.” The U.N.’s mission in Sierra Leone was per capita the most expensive humanitarian relief operation in the world at the time. The old rebel believed that, instead of being vilified for the mutilations, he and his comrades should be thanked for rescuing their country.

…

The scenes of suffering that we tend to call humanitarian crises are almost always symptoms of political circumstances, and there’s no apolitical way of responding to them—no way to act without having a political effect. At the very least, the role of the officially neutral, apolitical aid worker in most contemporary conflicts is, as Nightingale forewarned, that of a caterer: humanitarianism relieves the warring parties of many of the burdens (administrative and financial) of waging war, diminishing the demands of governing while fighting, cutting the cost of sustaining casualties, and supplying the food, medicine, and logistical support that keep armies going. At its worst—as the Red Cross demonstrated during the Second World War, when the organization offered its services at Nazi death camps, while maintaining absolute confidentiality about the atrocities it was privy to—impartiality in the face of atrocity can be indistinguishable from complicity.

As usual, the whole story is worth reading.

This sounds like a worthwhile project.

The Darfur Stoves Project seeks to protect Darfuri women by providing them with specially developed stoves which require less firewood, hence decreasing women’s exposure to violence while collecting firewood and their need to trade food rations for fuel.

The Darfur Stoves Project works with international partners such as Oxfam America and the Sudanese organization, Sustainable Action Group (SAG).

With our partners, the Darfur Stoves Project has produced over 15,000 stoves.

Bill Ayers, a son of privilege who in the 1960’s plotted to bomb symbols of American power, escaped prison because the FBI was overzealous and tainted its case against him.

Too bad. Instead, he went on to teach college and spread his anti-Americanism ti numerous generations with tax dollars.

The text below the video is from a Nov. 20 blog post by Ayers. His reflexive anti-Americanism stands in stark contrast to the experience of America expressed by Bono and Bush, both of whom were interviewed by Fox News Brett Baier yesterday on the occasion of AIDS day.

First Bono:

Now President Bush:

Finally, Ayers:

Currently teaching a seminar in Europe, I’m reminded once again just how isolating it can be to live inside the US, breathing the anesthetizing air of privilege and walking the treacherous terrain of denial. Wherever I go, discovering that I’m an American, folks strike a kind of pitying stance, assuming that as an American, educated in American schools, I will have no facility with language (and likely a relatively weak grasp of English), a badly distorted and in large parts vacant sense of history, and zero geographic literacy—quick! Draw a free-hand sketch of Iraq or Afghanistan! Find Palestine on a blank map of the world! Name every country with a US military base inside its sovereign territory!

Thankfully, people have an almost universal capacity to make a hard distinction between the American people and the US government. Bus drivers, bakers, waitresses are as kind and generous and hospitable as they can possibly be, but spend an extra minute or two, and each will explain in no uncertain terms the contempt they share for US policy in the world. It’s a wake-up, and that’s why I think we all need to get out more, to scrape some of the scales off our vision and to see the US through other eyes.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s much to love and to cherish in America, starting with the land itself and its wild and unruly people, our dizzying diversity, our restless traditions of migration and our admirable history of resistance and rebellion and disobedience, our vast creativity and large imaginative spaces, our overall queerness. Admit it—it’s all pretty great, and I feel most at home myself when I’m with my peeps right there in the heartland, embracing the whole McGillicuddy.

But still, I recommend a trip abroad. You don’t have to board a plane or a boat for the trip I have in mind; it requires nothing more than an active and willing consciousness—simply take a metaphoric left turn off the interstate, and have a look back from the perspective of a free person with a free mind. The promise is that fresh and startling winds might blow, and you might free yourself from the relentlessly dogmatic American “common sense” hatched in the halls of power and beamed at us in a steady barrage of mediated images. You might shake yourself awake from the deep, deep American sleep afflicting us all, and you could well discover new possibilities and more hopeful alternatives.

Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, launched the modern environmental movement and led to the banning of DDT in much of Africa. It can be destructive when misused, but can otherwise save lives.

But now that has changed.

…Some commentators and activists have raised concerns about DDT contaminating the environment if it is used in vector control. As with the other insecticides used in IRS, DDT causes minimal or zero contamination of the wider environment.

Because DDT does not escape into the wider environment, it poses little or no threat to wildlife. Results from the 2008 MIS demonstrated the dramatic progress Zambia is making in its fight to control malaria. Since 2006, malaria parasite prevalence in children has been reduced by 50 percent, and moderate to severe anemia has been reduced by more than 60 percent.

DDT is not only highly effective in malaria control, but it is also significantly cheaper than the other insecticides that are suitable for indoor residual spraying (IRS). It is easy to use and safe for both the residents of houses sprayed and the sprayers themselves.

More people than ever are sleeping under bed nets and two-thirds of all households are protected by at least one ITN or indoor residual spraying. Use of DDT to fight malaria has been increasing since it was endorsed in 2006 by the World Health Organization and the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), a U.S. aid program launched by former President Bush.

USAID provides approximately $26 million per year to Malawi under PMI to purchase and distribute about 1, 600, 000 long life insecticide-treated bed nets, according to its Malawi office fact sheet.

The Bush administration managed to broker a treaty that ended a decades long war in Sudan between the north and south. (The north is Muslim while the south is Christian/animist and has the oil.)

That the treaty came soon after the fall of Saddam was no coincidence: tyrants respond to existential threats, both direct and implied.

But now it’s Obama’s turn, and New York Time columnist Nicholas Kristof, a liberal, sees The One blowing it.

Until he reached the White House, Barack Obama repeatedly insisted that the United States apply more pressure on Sudan so as to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur and elsewhere.

Yet, as president, Mr. Obama and his aides have caved, leaving Sudan gloating at American weakness. Western monitors, Sudanese journalists and local civil society groups have all found this month’s Sudanese elections to be deeply flawed — yet Mr. Obama’s special envoy for Sudan, Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, pre-emptively defended the elections, saying they would be “as free and as fair as possible.” The White House showed only a hint more backbone with a hurried reference this week to “an essential step” with “serious irregularities.”

President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan — the man wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Darfur — has been celebrating. His regime calls itself the National Congress Party, or N.C.P., and he was quoted in Sudan as telling a rally in the Blue Nile region: “Even America is becoming an N.C.P. member. No one is against our will.”

Memo to Mr. Obama: When a man who has been charged with crimes against humanity tells the world that America is in his pocket, it’s time to review your policy.

Perhaps the Obama administration caved because it considers a flawed election better than no election. That’s a reasonable view, one I share. It’s conceivable that Mr. Bashir could have won a quasi-fair election — oil revenues have manifestly raised the standard of living in parts of Sudan — and the campaigning did create space for sharp criticism of the government.

It’s also true that Sudan has been behaving better in some respects. The death toll in Darfur is hugely reduced, and the government is negotiating with rebel groups there. The Sudanese government gave me a visa and travel permits to Darfur, allowing me to travel legally and freely.

The real game isn’t, in fact, Darfur or the elections but the maneuvering for a possible new civil war. The last north-south civil war in Sudan ended with a fragile peace in 2005, after some two million deaths. The peace agreement provided for a referendum, scheduled to take place in January, in which southern Sudanese will decide whether to secede. They are expected to vote overwhelmingly to form a separate country.

Then the question becomes: will the north allow South Sudan to separate? The south holds the great majority of the country’s oil, and it’s difficult to see President Bashir allowing oil fields to walk away.

“If the result of the referendum is independence, there is going to be war — complete war,” predicts Mudawi Ibrahim Adam, one of Sudan’s most outspoken human rights advocates. He cautions that America’s willingness to turn a blind eye to election-rigging here increases the risk that Mr. Bashir will feel that he can get away with war.

“They’re very naïve in Washington,” Mr. Mudawi said. “They don’t understand what is going on.”

Nicholas Kristof:

It’s easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s even easier to assume that we’d do better.

Not really. Not after Bill Clinton turned a blind eye to the Rwanda genocide.

But so far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo war’s death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.

What those numbers don’t capture is the way Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture and mutilation, in ways that sear survivors like Jeanne Mukuninwa, a beautiful, cheerful young woman of 19 who somehow musters the courage to giggle. Her parents disappeared in the fighting when she had just turned 14 — perhaps they were massacred, but their bodies never turned up — so she moved in with her uncle.

A few months later, the extremist Hutu militia invaded the home. She remembers that it was the day of her very first menstrual period — the only one she has ever had.

Read on.

Environmentalism has long shown an anti-capitalist bias.

Many of Europe’s ex-commies didn’t fade away and get jobs, they mutated into green warriors, or watermelons — green on the outside, red on the inside.

Communist block nations had the worst environmental records, a fact that  just doesn’t register with nitwits.

Now we have tyrants lecturing us at Copenhagen.

Zimbabwe’s veteran President, who is the target of Western sanctions over alleged human rights abuses.

Alleged? I allege that the sky is blue.

“When these capitalist gods of carbon burp and belch their dangerous emissions, it’s we, the lesser mortals of the developing sphere who gasp and sink and eventually die.”

The 85-year-old said industrialised countries in the northern hemisphere which bore historical responsibility for global warming showed none of the zeal for punishing ‘eco-offenders’ that they did for abusers of human rights.

“Why is the guilty north not showing the same fundamentalist spirit it exhibits in our developing countries on human rights matters on this more menacing threat of climate change?” he said.

Mugabe took a prosperous African nation and reduced it to ruin.

All the “help poor Africa” pleas in the west aim to help poor nations become what Zimbabwe already was — rich and self-sufficient.

World leaders gathering in New York to resolve global problems? Sounds like the UN General Assembly — well, except when they’re all across town with Bill Clinton.

The Democratic Party legend basked Tuesday in his unofficial role of world problem solver as he opened the fifth annual session of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), timed to coincide with the huge UN meeting a few blocks away.

Swelling, movie-style music accompanied the white-haired Clinton as he took the stage at the Sheraton hotel where he joked of having been afraid, following the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, that “we’d throw a party and no one would come.”

Not that there were real worries on that score.

President Barack Obama gave the keynote speech, saying “Bill Clinton has helped improve and save the lives of millions.”

Bill Clinton watched from the sidelines as 800,000 innocents were macheted to death in Rwanda — 8,000 a day for 100 consecutive days.

Bill Clinton emoted about the AIDS epidemic, but did nothing. President Bush acted and saved millions of African lives.

Speaking of Africa, has Obama done anything to improve the life of his half-brother or other kin in Africa?

FLASHBACK to February 2008:

Mr. Geldof is an Irish rock and roll singer and longtime social activist who has helped, along with U2 rocker Bono, raise awareness about need in Africa. His most well known achievement is organizing the Live Aid concert in 1985, which raised money for debt relief for poor African countries.

But Mr. Geldof has remained closely engaged with African affairs since then, and he spoke off the cuff to reporters today who were waiting for a press conference with Mr. Bush and Rwandan President Paul Kagame.

Mr. Geldof praised Mr. Bush for his work in delivering billions to fight disease and poverty in Africa, and blasted the U.S. press for ignoring the achievement.

Mr. Bush, said Mr. Geldof, “has done more than any other president so far.”

“This is the triumph of American policy really,” he said. “It was probably unexpected of the man. It was expected of the nation, but not of the man, but both rose to the occasion.”

“What’s in it for [Mr. Bush]? Absolutely nothing,” Mr. Geldof said.

Mr. Geldof said that the president has failed “to articulate this to Americans” but said he is also “pissed off” at the press for their failure to report on this good news story.

“You guys didn’t pay attention,” Geldof said to a group of reporters from all the major newspapers.

Bush administration officials, incidentally, have also been quite displeased with some of the press coverage on this trip that they have viewed as overly negative and ignoring their achievements.

Michael Godwin:

The video of Hillary Clinton peevishly snapping at a student questioner in the Congo was the meltdown seen ’round the world. But that undiplomatic moment was hardly her worst on the Africa swing.

The real clunker came with her pathetic attempt to compare Nigeria’s corrupt and violent 2007 elections to the contested 2000 American presidential results.

In equating the two, the secretary of state echoes President Obama’s sour apologia tours around the globe. Either he’s writing her speeches now or Clinton’s drinking the White House Kool-Aid. Neither is appealing.

The bended-knee approach abroad shames America and reduces our great nation to the sum of its mistakes and failures. And it seems designed to create the misleading impression that Third-World kleptocrats and genocidal maniacs are, gee, just like us.

Clinton’s moral equivalency moment came when she told a group of Nigerian activists that, “In 2000, our presidential election came down to one state where the brother of the man running for President was the governor of the state. So we have our problems, too.”

The reference to Florida, where Jeb Bush was governor, was inappropriate, no matter the context Clinton had in mind. The election ultimately was decided by the Supreme Court and all but wing nuts on the Democratic left accepted the court’s historic decision.

Whatever Clinton thinks of that outcome – she might have mentioned Bubba’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky if she wanted to give a full campaign recap – it was puerile nonsense to bring it up in an African nation that has never had a peaceful and fair transition of presidential power.

Nigerians would be thankful for any election that didn’t involve the army and stacks of corpses. Instead, they get childish bromides about American flaws.

That sends a demoralizing message to reformers fighting Nigeria’s government, which is regarded as one of the most corrupt in the world. One estimate suggests some $300 billion has been siphoned from oil revenues and international aid in the last decade alone.

The New Ledger:

For two years the United Nations paid lip service to the truth that the insecticide DDT is a vital component of malaria control, but last week UN abandoned science in favor of superstition. The result is UN promotion of more dangerous and less efficient malaria control techniques.

On May 5th, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Environment Program announced plans to reduce DDT use by 30% by 2014 and completely eliminate it by around 2020. In the mean time, the UN will roll out initiatives in 40 countries to test non-chemical methods of malaria control. In particular UN wants to scale up the programs of Central America, which have relied on “pharmacosuppression”.

Essentially, uninfected people in high risk locations are given the antimalarial drug chloroquine to suppress any future infection. In 2004, 3,400 malaria cases were diagnosed in Mexico, 6,897 in Nicaragua, and almost half a million in Brazil. But both Mexico and Nicaragua each distributed more anti-malaria pills (mostly chloroquine pills) than Brazil. Chloroquine is a wonderful drug at combating malaria and has saved millions of lives when used therapeutically, as in Brazil,, but prophylactic use is not safe because it is quite toxic and has led to heart problems when used repeatedly. As scientists at the University of Colima in Mexico explained last year, chloroquine “can induce lethal ventricular arrhythmias.”

Ironically, chloroquine is only slightly less toxic than DDT yet people have to eat chloroquine pills, they don’t eat DDT. The UN does not mention this, or that the Central American policy cannot be used in most other regions because of extensive resistance to chloroquine and high cost. So even if pharmacosuppression were clinically appropriate, it couldn’t be done in Africa anyway.

The UN’s push for a “zero DDT world”, ignores the millions of lives DDT has saved over the past century, with little to no adverse environmental impact and no harm to human health. From the late 1940s until the early 1970s, spraying DDT was the mainstay of anti-mosquito campaigns responsible for successfully eradicating malaria from North America and much of Europe. Thanks to DDT, by 1970, an estimated one billion people no longer lived in malaria-endemic areas; in Southeast Asia, cases fell from a high of 110 million in 1950 to nearly zero by 1969.

Witchdoctors reportedly buy albino body parts to make “magic” potions.

Since late 2007, 45 albinos have been slaughtered in Tanzania.

Forty-four of the killings have taken place in the Lake Zone district.

Police believe the killers are selling their victims’ limbs, hair, skin and genitals to traditional medicine practitioners who make potions promising to make people wealthy.

Once an African economic powerhouse, now a disaster.

Zimbabwe’s unemployment rate has spiked to 94 percent, meaning that fewer than half a million people in the country are formally employed, the UN’s humanitarian arm said Thursday.

“At close of 2008, only six percent of the population was formally employed, down from 30 percent in 2003,” said a report from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Out of the country’s 12 million people, only 480,000 have formal jobs, down from 3.6 million in 2003, the report said.

“The most obvious indicator of the current decline is the staggering inflation rate,” last estimated at 231 million percent in July, it said.

From the White House website, in PDF form. Nicely produced.

Something seldom mentioned is Bush’s AIDS and malaria initiatives. Consider:

The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in history. Since the President launched this initiative in 2003, PEPFAR has supported life-saving treatment for more than 2.1 million people and care for more than 10.1 million people worldwide.

The Program was reauthorized in 2008, and under this legislation the next phase of the program will support treatment for a total of at least three million people, the prevention of 12 million new infections, and care for 12 million people, including five million orphans and vulnerable children.

The President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) is on track to reduce malaria deaths by half in 15 targeted countries across Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2007 alone, the PMI reached more than 25 million people with lifesaving treatment and prevention services, and this good work continues. America’s also became the first and largest contributor to the Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. America also expanded an initiative to treat more than 300 million people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America suffering from seven major neglected tropical diseases.

If you think this is just Bush tooting his own horn, watch the PBS Frontline show on AIDS. Bush was the one who changed the game in Africa.

Very few “humanitarians” on the Left even understand the deep contributions President Bush has made, particularly in Africa. He not only boosted foreign aid in key places, but did it smartly so that local kleptocrats couldn’t steal it.

Sir Bob Geldof, the former rock star turned advocate for global poverty relief, followed President Bush in the program at Tuesday’s White House Summit on International Development. And it was easy to see why. While most celebs and artists take glee in knocking the president, the man behind Live Aid had only plaudits for our short-timer of a commander-in-chief.

In fact, said the shaggy-haired and tie-less musician, “It’s why I’m here.” Geldof praised the Bush administration for its increased commitment to aid for Africa, “a story that’s not been told.” And he pleaded with the crowd to “tell that story. … You can’t leave it up to a couple of Paddy pop stars to tell it” (the other being Bono).

“It’s no small legacy,” he added, and Bush has “set the bar quite high” for Barack Obama or John McCain.

Not that Bush has everything going for him. When speculating about the president’s post-White House occupation, Geldof joked that he wouldn’t be a very good roadie.

Geldof, who rarely cracks a smile even when cracking a joke, also couldn’t resist needling the crowd and the organizers. “Frankly this is a pretty small crowd for me,” making a quick reference to his former life as a rock star.

 This always escaped notice. From the second debate:

Obama: Well, we may not always have national security issues at stake, but we have moral issues at stake.

If we could have intervened effectively in the Holocaust, who among us would say that we had a moral obligation not to go in?

If we could’ve stopped Rwanda, surely, if we had the ability, that would be something that we would have to strongly consider and act.

So when genocide is happening, when ethnic cleansing is happening somewhere around the world and we stand idly by, that diminishes us.

Bill Clinton could have stopped Rwanda quickly with 5000 Marines.

The 8,000 daily deaths were inflicted by wild-eyed men with machetes. Any show of civilized force would have popped the balloon and ended it.

Is Obama that clueless about history? Or just full of shit?

Given Obama’s track record in Africa — leaving his half brother to live in penury, pledging to support a school in his father’s homeland and then stiffing them — the latter seems true.

Here’s a film about the Rwandan genocide that pulls no punches, unlike Hotel Rwanda. 

Filmed in the actual school where 2500 Tutsis had found asylum under the protection of Belgian UN peacekeepers, it lays bare the moral cowardice of the UN and the Clinton administration.

Near the end, the filmmakers include a clip of State Department spokesperson Prudence Bushnell torturing the definition of genocide (if the US acknowledged the genocide, we were compelled to intervene) at a news conference.

They don’t show what happened after Bushnell finished:

After she left the podium, Michael McCurry, the department spokesman, took her place and criticized foreign governments for preventing the screening of the Steven Spielberg film Schindler’s List. “This film movingly portrays … the twentieth century’s most horrible catastrophe,” he said. “And it shows that even in the midst of genocide, one individual can make a difference.”

I wish it had gone one bit further and shown Bill Clinton making his pit-stop apology in Kigali a few years after 800,000 Tutsis were macheted to death over 100 days.

Making eye contact and shaking his head, he explained, “It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate [pause] the depth [pause] and the speed [pause] with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”  

That was a blatant lie. Bush is blamed for the deaths of American military and Iraqi civilians. He is blamed for ruining our international reputation.

But whose respect do we covet? The Belgian peacekeepers who abandoned the Tutsis to their doom? The French who rode to the rescue of the white Europeans and kicked the Africans off their trucks?

Clinton was popular in Europe because it takes a coward to love a coward. Bush may not have gotten everything right in Iraq (no war leader ever does) but our motives were righteous.

Note: The film has an alternate title, Shooting Dogs. The Belgians were not allowed to fire their guns unless shot at, which meant they couldn’t fire upon mobs hacking Tutsis to death with machetes right outside their gates. But when wild dogs came to feast upon the remains, they shot them.

Nelson Mandela recently celebrated his 90th birthday. A huge rock concert was held in London’s Hyde Park as a fundraiser for Mandela’s AIDS charity.

But the tragedy of South Africa’s AIDS epidemic could have been averted  by Mandela.

We quote from the 4-hour PBS documentary, The Age of AIDS.

NARRATOR: As in the West, gay activists were among the first to warn that aids was coming.

EDWIN CAMERON, AIDS Law Project: I got infected, as thousands, hundreds of thousands of comparable gay men in Sydney and San Francisco and elsewhere. But it was already plain at that stage that there was a heterosexual African epidemic, which was going to surpass the epidemic amongst people like myself.

ZACKIE ACHMAT: We started an HIV prevention program, trying to speak to people about it, trying to say to people to use condoms, and so on.

NARRATOR: In the black townships, the activists met resistance.

MANDLA MAJOLO: People from outside come into your community, telling you how to behave, especially if they are whites and you’re black, and you can easily look at it as if they think that you are irresponsible sexually. And once you reach that feeling, you start to build walls.

NARRATOR:In pockets across the nation, like rural KwaZulu-Natal, people began to die from AIDS. Increasingly, they were women, infected by their husbands and lovers who’d worked in the mines.

D.E. NDWANDWE, Nurse, KwaZulu-Natal: We used to get more males than females, but eventually, there was a change and we got more female patients than males, you know, such a change that we actually had to change the accommodation at some stage, use the people who worked for females and use the other ward for males.

NARRATOR:For four years after Mandela’s release, the apartheid leaders and the ANC were consumed with the transfer of power. In that political vacuum, an opportunity to stem the epidemic was slipping away.

SALIM ABDOOL KARIM, M.D., University of KwaZulu-Natal: In a way, the complex political transition, the lack of credibility of the apartheid government at that time, which was disintegrating, in effect, and the new government was yet to be installed- and the new government had all kinds of challenges, not least HIV.

NARRATOR: In poor, crowded townships like Soweto, the epidemic accelerated. doctors at the nation’s largest hospital were soon overwhelmed.

GLENDA GRAY, M.D., Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto: It was just hemorrhaging. And we just watched this- this thing explode in our face.

NARRATOR: Babies were being infected by their mothers through childbirth and breast feeding.

Dr. GLENDA GRAY:As HIV became more frequent and more commonplace in children, and as they needed more and more care, the ICUs in the country also made decisions not to admit children with HIV into their ICUs because it was terminal, and we needed to keep the beds open for children who had better prognosis. HIV became the new apartheid in South Africa. You know, we discriminated not on race anymore, but on HIV status.

Nurses were burnt out. Doctors didn’t care, as well, you know? “Why should I care when the government doesn’t care?”

NARRATOR: In May 1994, when Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s president, he saw his job as reconciliation, holding his fractured nation together. Activists hoped he would also make time for AIDS.

EDWIN CAMERON:At the time I chaired a national convention on AIDS, my co-chair and I made every effort we could to get an audience with President Mandela, and we didn’t succeed. We got an audience instead with Deputy President de Klerk, and Deputy President Mbeki joined the meeting.

NARRATOR:Mandela delegated AIDS to his deputy, Thabo Mbeki

Mbeki, Mandela’s eventual successor and SA’s current leader, became convinced that HIV was not the cause of AIDS and thwarted efforts to deal with the crisis.

In the US, Senator Jesse Helms was blocking efforts to send aid to Africa, primarily on moral grounds. Then he got a visit from singer, Bono. Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, was also advocating help for Africa.

Then Bush stepped in, doing what Bill Clinton never did: act.

NARRATOR: Bono’s activism was backed by his own Christian faith. Franklin Graham took notice.

Rev. FRANKLIN GRAHAM: Bono has a pretty significant level of biblical understanding. He’s read the Bible. Not once, but I think he’s read it many times.

BONO: I was offended to discover that the religiosity of this country was not available to the AIDS emergency, so I asked to meet as many church leaders as I could and used examples from the Scriptures. You know, “Isn’t this the leprosy of the age,” I argued. “Isn’t this what,” you know, “the Christ spent his time with?” And yet the church now is walking across the road and looking the other way.

NARRATOR: With Franklin Graham’s support, Bono came to Washington to meet Jesse Helms.

BONO: Jesse Helms is a tough guy, but he’s also rigorous, from his point of view. So you know, Christ only speaks of judgment once, and oddly enough, it’s in regard to the poor. I think it’s Matthew 23. It’s the famous lines, “I was naked and you clothed me. I was a prisoner and you visited me.’ And then they say to Christ, “What are you talking about? You weren’t.” “I was sick and you came to me.” And he says, “No, no, I wasn’t. But as much as you do this to the least of these, you do it unto me.” And that’s a very powerful piece of Scripture.

And he was very moved. Even emotionally, he kind of welled up. And as I was leaving the room, he said – big Southern- big, tall, Southern old boy, you know, just this amazing character- he said, “I want to give you a blessing.” And he put his arms around me and then he gave me this blessing. And I take such- I take blessings pretty seriously. And I went out and of course told the assembled press what had happened, and they couldn’t believe it.

I’m very humbled. I’m having my world turned upside down, and I’m surprised that people should be so generous in letting an obvious outsider in.

Sen. JESSE HELMS: You’ll never be an outsider. You’ll always be a friend.

Rev. FRANKLIN GRAHAM: He respected what Bono was telling him, and Senator Helms changed his position to where opposing funding for HIV/AIDS, he became an advocate for funding.

Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH: Thank you all. Bono, I appreciate your heart. Let me tell you what an influence you’ve had. Dick Cheney walked in the Oval Office, he said, “Jesse Helms wants us to listen to Bono’s ideas.” That’s pretty-

BONO: And he was very well informed about it. I was surprised that he knew- you know, he knew as much as he did. And to be fair to President Bush, he really responded, and he responded in a way that no one could ever have imagined.

NARRATOR: Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top scientist from the NIH, was summoned to the White House. They wanted a plan on AIDS.

Dr. ANTHONY FAUCI: It was driven by the president. He said he wanted it to be feasible, he wanted it to be bold, and he wanted it to be accountable.

NARRATOR: Bush was also getting advice from Franklin Graham, one of his spiritual advisers.

Rev. FRANKLIN GRAHAM: I tried to encourage him to- first of all, in most of Africa, not only do you have a church, but there are church-related hospitals. And we need to enlist these churches in this fight against HIV/AIDS. And we don’t need to be pouring this money into some of these governments, who are going to squander the money.

NARRATOR: A plan emerged. It would draw on both religious and government health services already in place.

Dr. ANTHONY FAUCI: Therapy prevention care for HIV can really work under these circumstances, if you do it the African way. Don’t parachute in your own preconceived notion about how things can be done, do it the way the Africans feel that they can do it.

The White House staff said, “We believe you, Tony, but you’re a white American who works for the federal government. We want to hear, is this thing feasible from people who are in the trenches.”

NARRATOR: Fauci reached out to Uganda’s leading AIDS specialist to convince the White House staff.

PETER MUGYENYI, M.D., Joint Clinical Research Ctr.: They were very skeptical that infrastructure would not support anti-retroviral therapy on the African continent. They even went to some extremes of saying that the continent do not even have clean water.

NARRATOR: In January 2003, the plan was still behind closed doors. With a looming war in Iraq, there were worries about the White House’s priorities.

BONO: I said that to President Bush. You know, I said, “Look, paint them red, white and blue, if you want, but these drugs are the best advertisement you’re going to get right now, and that might be important right now.” And so, you know, above the moral imperatives comes the political imperative to some people. So fine, whatever brings you to the party.

NARRATOR: As the president arrived for his State of the Union speech, everyone expected him to issue an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein. They were not prepared for what came first.

Pres. GEORGE W. BUSH: Today, on the continent of Africa, nearly 30 million people have the AIDS virus, yet across that continent, only 50,000 AIDS victims – only 50,000 – are receiving the medicine they need. I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.

Dr. PETER MUGYENYI: That sounded like melodious music. From there onwards, things would never be the same. And that was victory for the people who were suffering and who were now going to have hope.

The entire documentary is online in multiple video formats.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, widely condemned for abuses in a country reeling from a growing humanitarian crisis, has been stripped of the honorary degree he received from UMass Amherst in 1986.

Take that!

Faces of evil. 

The men who pulled up in three white pickup trucks were looking for Patson Chipiro, head of the Zimbabwean opposition party in Mhondoro district. His wife, Dadirai, told them he was in Harare but would be back later in the day, and the men departed.

An hour later they were back. They grabbed Mrs Chipiro and chopped off one of her hands and both her feet. Then they threw her into her hut, locked the door and threw a petrol bomb through the window.

The killing last Friday – one of the most grotesque atrocities committed by Robert Mugabe’s regime since independence in 1980 – was carried out on a wave of worsening brutality before the run-off presidential elections in just over two weeks. It echoed the activities of Foday Sankoh, the rebel leader in the Sierra Leone civil war that ended in 2002, whose trade-mark was to chop off hands and feet.

Yes, Virginia, there are evil doers and they’re not stopped with appeals to reason. As Bush said:

“There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men  and try to explain away their words. It’s natural, but it is deadly wrong.”

Yesterday we noted The New Republic’s call for intervention in Burma, where a nasty regime has kept it population mired in poverty for decades.

But what of Zimbabwe, which was once prosperous, one of the few African nations that didn’t need our pity or aid?

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Zimbabweans — orphans and old people, the sick and the down and out — have lost access to food and other basic humanitarian assistance as their government has clamped down on international aid groups it says are backing the political opposition, relief agencies say.